How does a tester find a job?

In this article we tackle a subject that is always live: the job search.

How do you find work as a QA specialist? What does it take?

When is the best time to start looking?
Better to start while you are still studying, when you are not yet 100 per cent ready — and you are unlikely ever to be 100 per cent ready.

What if you feel you are not ready yet?
Trying to learn all of it is pointless. You will never reach the horizon, just as you will never learn every technology or become a complete expert even in one corner of testing or programming.

In every field the best approach is to concentrate and choose one direction, and become an expert in it. Then companies looking for exactly that specialist will find you, and you will feel entirely competent.

The first step in a job search

Set up a LinkedIn profile.
As soon as you enter the job market, you have to announce yourself somehow. In America we recommend registering on LinkedIn straight away. Even if you are not going to look for work in the near future, register now and put a short resume there, even if you are not yet ready.

But be careful: build the profile without listing every job you have ever had. Limit yourself to describing the technologies you work with. Add a short introduction of yourself and how you present what you do.

LinkedIn is a professional platform where companies look for employees and where candidates write to companies. Even if you are not working or looking, you can still go there to exchange knowledge or simply read the feed.

Keep your profile and resume tidy.
Bear in mind something very important: your resume and your LinkedIn profile are not your autobiography. There is no need to write chronologically about where you started, where you studied, what family you were born into or what you dreamed of as a child.

Put down information about yourself focused on the position you are applying for.

Everything you write should serve to present you as a testing and programming specialist.

Most importantly, do not be modest. Understating yourself will not help you. In the USA, on LinkedIn, putting yourself forward is exactly the right strategy: every strength and every achievement should be on show, because if you do not say it, nobody will know it.

You may be superb at what you do and nobody will find out. Publish everything useful to a prospective employer and write about your achievements.

Writing "worked at company AAA, did 123" is not a good strategy and is not needed.

You have to stand out, and you do not have much space to put down the most important information so that someone can read about you very quickly.

Write about yourself in five sentences — the essentials, your achievements only. A list of duties is not interesting.

Boast a little.
Show yourself. Companies want people on their teams who can do something on their own or take responsibility for a part of the work. In your resume and your LinkedIn profile you should write not merely that you are responsible but confirm it with an example.

Simply writing "responsible, proactive, punctual, helpful" gives general words that say nothing about you.

Confirm it with examples.
What other ways are there? Think about how you might show that you genuinely are punctual. Perhaps you arrive half an hour early to set up your workspace and check the defects.

Write about the achievement you brought, the value you brought to the company, how you helped it earn more.

A company hires you so that you come in and help the organisation earn more. When you write about your achievements, bear that in mind and give examples.

Do not understate your achievements.
If you have no experience, you need to gain it: take part in a project, contribute to one, be actively involved for a few months so as to get the sense of it.

Sell yourself.
You are selling a product. You are being bought; you are being paid for your time.

If you worked as a tram driver and are applying for a testing role, that item does not belong on your resume.

You have to be visible, and the job search takes hard work. First you studied and gained knowledge. The other skill you need to acquire is job hunting.

Recruiters talk to new candidates often in order to see whether they fit in spirit. Listening and talking is the right thing on their part too. As you talk to recruiters and build up that process, you will come to see the patterns in how those conversations go.

Once your profile is working, you have to do a great deal of work daily, and intensively.

If you are not getting daily incoming calls, then you did not finish the first part properly. Counting on one or two calls a week to produce a result is foolish.

Take the initiative.
That is normal — it can and should be done. Call people yourself, write to them on LinkedIn, send your resume out through the day. Those actions will secure you several technical interviews a week.

A technical interview is not just a conversation: a company's technical representative gets in touch and you discuss cases and algorithmic problems.

The questions can be anything. You cannot prepare for all of them, and learning everything in a lifetime is not possible. What matters is experimenting.

At every stage of an interview, keep smiling, stay positive and do not be rude. No questions about religion or race.

Treat the interview process as practice.

If you go in thinking this is the company of my dreams, what if it does not work out?
Push that thought away. Go into the interview accepting that you have already been rejected. That will help you feel calm, and you will answer normally, calmly and correctly.

With several technical interviews a week, after a while you will start to see the pattern of what happens.

You will need to sit a certain number of technical interviews before you understand and decode that pattern.

The main mistakes

Do not switch off your phone.
Even once you have taken a job, even once you have what looks like a good offer. Do not switch off your profile, keep replying, keep communicating, keep interviewing.

The next part is when the calls start coming. You have to talk to people and put across the idea that you are a good specialist.

Reading from a script.
Another mistake is preparing a text and reading it out. Do not do that. You can prepare the main points about yourself, but when someone calls, answer from memory.
It is obvious when people read from a page, and it signals a lack of professionalism. Do not read from a page. Write out an account of yourself if you like, but then close it and speak in your own words.

In numbers
How many calls a day should there be?
At least ten incoming calls a day, at which point you can say you are in a healthy working state. Beyond those calls you also need to act yourself: write to people, perhaps even to strangers on LinkedIn — professionals working in your field at other companies — and ask whether they are looking for someone for their team.

How many interviews does it take to find a job?

One or two interviews are generally enough to get an offer. But if you are applying for a demanding position, you will have to sit more.

If you are level-headed and positive and also know the subject well, even theoretically, you have a chance — because level-headed people are in short supply.

You will settle down and start answering with confidence after a few interviews.

You will be rejected along the way. That is normal. Sometimes you do not fit the company. Perhaps they were looking for someone else.

Understand that every rejection you get is training, and nothing more — training that sharpens your skills.

When can you say something is going wrong?
When you have had 20 or 30 rejections after technical interviews.

If you are getting 20 or 30 rejections after technical interviews, it is time to think about what you are not working on.

To make the search easier and clearer, come to us at PASV — Programming Academy in Silicon Valley. We teach you to interview in English, help with your CV and run a bootcamp.

Good luck.